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Google’s “Accelerated Mobile Pages” project launched for real this week, and it’s pretty amazing. I still worry about giant, centralized companies and their power–and it shouldn’t be needed in the first place. For more, check out my deep dive into AMP at Medium Backchannel. Key quote:

Before getting into details about what’s happening here, let’s be clear on something. AMP wouldn’t be necessary — assuming it is in the first place — if the news industry hadn’t so thoroughly poisoned its own nest.

Looking for money in a business that grows more financially troubled by the month, media companies have infested articles with garbage code, much of it on behalf of advertising/surveillance companies, to the extent that readers have quite reasonably rebelled. We don’t like slow-responding sites, period. On our mobile devices, which are taking over as the way we “consume” information, we despise having to download megabytes of crapware just to read something, because the carriers charge us for the privilege. That’s one reason why we use ad blockers. (The other, at least for me, is that we despise being spied on so relentlessly.) The news business could have solved this problem without racing into the arms of giant, centralized tech companies. But it didn’t, and here we are.